We investigate changes in the time series characteristics of postwar U.S. inflation. In a model-based analysis the conditional mean of inflation is specified by a long memory autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average process and the conditional variance is modelled by a stochastic...

Highly non-elliptical posterior distributions may occur in several econometric models, in particular, when the likelihood information is allowed to dominate and data information is weak. We explain the issue of highly non-elliptical posteriors in a model for the effect of education on income...

Unobserved components time series models decompose a time series into a trend, a season, a cycle, an irregular disturbance, and possibly other components. These models have been successfully applied to many economic time series. The standard assumption of a linear model, often appropriate after...

In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

An efficient and accurate approach is proposed for forecasting Value at Risk [VaR] and Expected Shortfall [ES] measures in a Bayesian framework. This consists of a new adaptive importance sampling method for Quantile Estimation via Rapid Mixture of t approximations [QERMit]. As a first step the...

This discussion paper led to a publication in 'Computational Statistics & Data Analysis' 56(11), pp. 3398-1414.Important choices for efficient and accurate evaluation of marginal likelihoods by means of Monte Carlo simulation methods are studied for the case of highly non-elliptical posterior...

The increasing availability of financial market data at intraday frequencies has not only led to the development of improved ex-post volatility measurements but has also inspired research into their potential value as an informa-tion source for longer horizon volatility forecasts. In this paper...

The linear Gaussian state space model for which the common variance istreated as a stochastic time-varying variable is considered for themodelling of economic time series. The focus of this paper is on thesimultaneous estimation of parameters related to the stochasticprocesses of the mean part...

A major economic reason for the introduction of the euro was its supposedly positive effect on intra-EMU trade. Existing studies examine this suspicion indirectly using non-EMU data and report ambiguous results. We estimate the euro-effect directly from data that include EMU observations. Using...